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Beyond race?

Liam Julian

March 18, 2008

Barack Obama said today that our currently segregated schools create and prolong achievement gaps. He compared them to segregated schools 50 years ago. These ideas are patently false--segregated schools circa 1960 are not, for a pile of reasons, analogous to the naturally, racially separated schools that exist today. To keep blurring this distinction doesn't get anyone "beyond race"; it merely misrepresents a complicated issue by eliding the facts and history of public-school desegregation. And it neglects to acknowledge the fine work being done in some of the most educationally separated settings.